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JJ Villiard

I saw JJ Villiard’s Son of Satan about 8 years ago and it’s still one of the best graduation films I’ve seen. It’s a 10 minute filmed based on a Charles Bukowski short story about a dysfunctional youth. The whole film is perfect punk. Energetic and aggressively pragmatic in it’s use of sound and image. Unfortunately for us it’s not online, but good for him he’s selling it on his website. Anyone who’s doing a screening, this comes highly recommended. His drawings are mighty fine as well.

If you remember Hunting for Hockney, a gentle, reflective ode to grief and to the Yorkshire moors created by Alice Dunseath a while back, I’d put money on you being equally enamoured by the newest piece to emerge from her audiovisually inclined brain. Entitled You Could Sunbathe in This Storm, the film is a mixed media animation “where space, forms, colours and sounds symbolise a recognisable world,” she says. “New beginnings put an end to familiar patterns and the viewer is left to wonder whether they shape as much as they are shaped.” As a gently rustling soundtrack lulls you into a sense of security, and a man’s timeworn voice reads out a section of The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water by W.B. Yeats, you find yourself slowly slipping into an endlessly tactile, subtly meditative alternative reality. Unsurprisingly, it’s been doing the rounds at film festivals and gallery screenings this summer – I can only imagine what it looks like projected to the size of a small house and watched in a dark room with the volume turned right up.

In America, land of the free and home of the mascot, Ronald McDonald was and still is a revered flame-haired icon. Even in the UK, he’s a recognisable, albeit terrifying, beacon of our past where happy meals and smooth-bunned burgers were a rare Friday night treat.

Artist Yolanda Dominguez is not one to shy away from using her practice to expose the social inequalities which underpin contemporary society. In previous projects – 2013’s Fashion Victims and 2014’s Gallery for example, we’ve seen her respond to Bangladesh’s factory disaster, in which more than 1,000 textile workers were killed when their workshop collapsed, and question our invasion of online privacy in the digital age, respectively. She often uses “culture jamming” techniques, utilising a given medium to subvert its own discourse, and in doing so evokes visceral responses and stirs up critical conversation around these much debated topics.

British Vogue has partnered with CANADA filmmaking collective to launch the first in a series of films for its Vogue Video offer. The film, called Ouch! That’s Big features model Anna Ewers and was styled by Vogue fashion editor Fran Burns. Shot in Barcelona, the short shows Anna having her foot tended to before probably my favourite song of 2013, Suuns’ 2020, kicks in as a fanfare to the stylish antics ahead. Weirdness, glamour, sumptuous architecture and a bump to the head ensue…

Who needs a plot, a famous cast or a beautiful set when you have a loveable collection of ethnically diverse Emoji, a dancing lady and a smiling poo, eh? Not Sony Pictures Animation; the studio has just won a bidding battle to produce an animated movie based around the recognisable Apple-created characters who have come to communicate our every emotion, whim and fancy, Deadline announced today. The film is to be written by Anthony Leondis and Eric Siegel, who have yet to reveal how they intend to make a masterpiece out of our favourite funnies.

We’ve already seen astounding interactive music videos, and live Spike Jonze-directed pieces performed and filmed at the YouTube Music Awards, so really a feature-length film is the last of the unchartered territory in Arcade Fire’s commingling of music and visuals.